This year, the most divisive fight in Minnesota is not over whom to elect for public office, but whether the state Constitution should be amended to define marriage as an institution between one man and one woman.
That's a question we also put to Minnesotans in our poll, which marks the 68th year that we have polled residents across the state about their lifestyles and their politics. The very nature of this question illustrates the value of continuing to poll for nearly seven decades; we can capture changing family, societal and political views as they evolve over time. One could not imagine asking that question in 1944, the year we first started polling.
It's also the reason we have continued to find resources to continue polling, even though many newspapers have abandoned polls as too expensive.
For weeks now, leaders in the community have been asking when they would see a Star Tribune poll, given the nature of the election year we are facing. We picked our moment carefully. Ideally, we would have published a poll immediately after Labor Day. But we didn't want to be in the field in the immediate wake of either of the two major political conventions, because that may have skewed the results.
We also spent extensive time researching the various polling vendors available to us, and the types of polling they offered. Political editor Pat Lopez, and Dennis McGrath, who oversees the polling, examined a number of options, taking care to look at pollsters' reputation for unbiased work, the use of cellphones vs. land lines, and how they weight their results. Price was also a factor, because we still use people, rather than automation, to make the phone calls.
This year, we selected Mason-Dixon, which has a quarter of a century of experience polling in all 50 states, and which has extensive experience working with newspapers. Some of the organization's current clients include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Salt Lake Tribune, Lee Newspapers of Montana, and the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle. Mason-Dixon also polls for a group of Florida newspapers and TV stations that include the Miami Herald, Tampa Bay Times and Bay News 9.
We are also considering, for the first time, supplementing our in-depth polls with automated polling for simple horse-race questions. We have not made a decision on this matter, but if we do, such results would not carry the Minnesota Poll brand.
Every year, without fail, someone accuses us of bias in how we poll. After many years of working with polls, I know that nearly every pollster has different methodology. It's not an exact science. For that reason, we want to be very transparent about how we are polling.
